August
21I think
everyone should go to college
and get a degree and then
spend
six
months as a bartender and six
months as a cabdriver. Then
they would really be educated.

Al McGuire

Today's
Meditation:

Having gone through many, many years of college and
then taught college for another decade or so afterward, I
would have to agree completely with Al. Students
leave college programs well acquainted with information
and theory, but very few social skills, very little
wisdom. Knowledge does not equal wisdom, yet many
people stay completely satisfied with knowledge their
whole lives through.

Bartenders and cabdrivers have jobs that demand that they
deal with other human beings their entire shift
long. Much of their contact can be negative, of
course, and neither job is necessarily a dream job, but
they sure can teach you valuable lessons about how to deal
with your fellow human beings. They can teach you
how to be tolerant of others' shortcomings and mistakes,
and they can help you to learn to judge less and listen
more. They can teach you to value the truly
important things in your life because in those jobs, you
have to deal with many people who are going through many
different experiences themselves, and often having a very
hard time of it.

Perhaps the most important element of these jobs, though,
is that they put people in positions in which they have to
listen. Listening--and truly paying attention while
doing so--is a skill that can prove to be one of the most
valuable skills of our lives, if we ever actually
cultivate it and practice it.

We all have people in our lives whom we tend never to
listen to, but if we can strike up conversations with the
janitors, the vendors, the waitresses, the mechanics--we
just may find that we learn something about life and
living that we haven't ever learned from the people who
are already in our lives. And if we ever do learn to
truly listen when others are speaking, then we can really
enrich this experience that we call life.

Questions to consider:

What's the difference between learning information and
theories and learning about life and living?

When was the last time that you had a conversation with
someone you don't normally converse with? Did you
learn anything about that person?

Why do we tend not to stretch our limits by finding new
people to listen to and learn from? How are we
biased in choosing which people we'll listen to closely?

For further
thought:

The teaching which is written on paper is not the true
teaching.
Written
teaching is a kind of food for your brain. Of course
it is necessary
to take
some food for your brain, but it is more
important
to be yourself by practicing the right way of life.

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